Born in the Bay Area, Haley Mellin graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, attended the Whitney's Independent Study Program and taught at the Studio Museum in Harlem and MoMA. Mellin earned a PhD from the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, where she recently delivered the commencement speech. In 2017, she founded Art into Acres, which engages the art community in supporting permanent land protection. Her paintings and drawings unfold outdoors while doing research and practice in land conservation.

Mellin's work has been exhibited at Dittrich & Schlechtriem, Hauser & Wirth, MoMA Ps1, Bischoff Projects, Morán Morán, Giovanni's Room, and The Journal Gallery, among others. She is an educator and writer, with recent talks at The Whitney Museum of American Art, the American Academy in Berlin, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her latest co-authored paper, Conservation Imperatives, published in Frontiers in Science in June 2024, presents an affordable, achievable plan to safeguard Earth’s remaining biodiversity by conserving just over one percent of the planet’s land surface.